ArticleCommunications psychology2024
Paranoid and teleological thinking give rise to distinct social hallucinations in vision.
Article in Communications psychology, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 3 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
3 citing papers in PubMed.
- Shared and Individual Tuning Curves for Social Perception.Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science · 2026Article
- Delusional Experiences Emerging From AI Chatbot Interactions or "AI Psychosis".JMIR mental health · 2025Review
- Shared and individual tuning curves for social vision.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Paranoia (believing others intend harm) and excess teleological thinking (ascribing too much purpose) are non-consensual beliefs about agents. Human vision rapidly detects agents and their intentions. Might paranoia and teleology have roots in visual perception? Using displays that evoke the impression that one disc ('wolf') is chasing another ('sheep'), we find that paranoia and teleology involve perceiving chasing when there is none (studies 1 and 2) - errors we characterize as social hallucinations. When asked to identify the wolf or the sheep (studies 3, 4a, and 4b), we find high-paranoia participants struggled to identify sheep, while high-teleology participants were impaired at identifying wolves - both despite high-confidence. Both types of errors correlated with hallucinatory percepts in the real world. Although paranoia and teleology both involve excess perception of agency, the current results collectively suggest a perceptual distinction between the two, perhaps with clinical import.
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Registered trials
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